Book review: ‘Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man,’ by Walter Stahr

Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man

By Walter Stahr

Simon & Schuster, $32.50

William Seward is on the short list of men who should have been president of the United States but never got the chance.

As governor of New York, United States senator, one of the founders of the Republican Party, and secretary of state under two presidents, Seward was in the forefront of nearly every major political battle from the 1820s through the 1870s. More importantly, history has judged him to have been on the right side of nearly every major issue during his long and productive lifetime. A man of exceptional ability, he had the talent and temperament to be an excellent commander in chief.

What he lacked was timing.

It was Seward’s misfortune that at the exact moment he was most available for the presidency, history sprung one of its greatest surprises.

Rather than nominate Seward, the party’s most prominent member, delegates to the 1860 Republican convention in Chicago chose a favorite son, a little-known lawyer from Springfield, Ill., Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln’s eventual choice of Seward as his secretary of state turned out to be much more than an olive branch to maintain party unity. It placed by the new president’s side a man whose sage advice, competence, loyalty and genuine affection were critical to Lincoln’s success and ultimately the preservation of the Union itself.

If Seward’s timing was bad in 1860, it has improved with age.

Walter Stahr’s timely biography, “Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man,” follows in the wake of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” and Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation “Lincoln,” and is a welcome addition to the bibliography of American history.

With a tip of the cap to James Thomas Flexner’s classic life of George Washington, “Washington: The Indispensable Man,” Stahr argues convincingly in this new biography that Seward was indeed Lincoln’s “indispensable” man.

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Born in upstate New York at the dawn of the 19th century, Seward earned a law degree as well as a remarkable wife, Frances Miller Seward, who not only supported her husband’s public career, but privately pushed him to take bolder stands on radical issues like women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.

Seward embraced an expansionist view of government, advocating for canal and road building projects as an activist governor and eventually a United States senator. With the collapse of the Whig Party, Seward became one of the founders of the new Republican Party and its biggest star.

As a lifelong opponent of slavery, Seward’s “radicalism” was his undoing. Delegates to the 1860 convention believed the party stood a better chance with the lesser-known Lincoln, a man whose obscurity meant fewer enemies than the more famous Seward.

The Lincoln-Seward partnership did not get off to a promising start.

The older, more experienced Seward proposed a co-presidency, placing himself as Lincoln’s equal, if not superior. That Lincoln gracefully and forgivingly ignored Seward’s presumptuousness and forged a close working and personal relationship with Seward was typical of the magnanimous nature of our 16th president, a virtue Seward quickly came to revere.

Seward embraced his subordinate role and proved himself to be an exceptional loyal minister.

Given a nearly autonomous hand by the president to conduct foreign affairs as he saw fit, Seward managed to keep the Civil War a private affair with minimal meddling from European powers, most significantly Great Britain, whose economic interests may very well have led England to recognize Confederate independence if not for Seward’s deft diplomacy.

A gifted writer and speaker, Lincoln leaned on Seward when drafting his iconic inaugural addresses as well as the epochal Emancipation Proclamation.

On the night of April 14, 1865, while the president met his fate at Ford’s Theater, Seward nearly met his end when Lewis Powell, an accomplice of John Wilkes Booth, attacked the bed-bound Seward, who was recovering from a fractured neck and jaw suffered in a carriage accident. Critically injured, and disfigured for life, Seward recovered and served Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, providing the nation with continuity during the chaotic post-Civil War years, including Johnson’s impeachment trial and the trials of Reconstruction.

“Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensible Man” covers the obligatory highlights of Seward’s life, including his much maligned purchase of Alaska from Russia (“Seward’s Folly”). But Stahr’s triumph is in mining the lesser-known details of Seward’s life, particularly his long, loving and successful marriage and the odd but equally loving relationship with the much younger Olive Risley, whom he adopted after his wife’s death.

Doug McIntyre is a columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News and is heard from 5 to 9 a.m. weekdays on KABC (790 AM).